Saw him twice. Once with the Allison powered car and later with the jet. Man, He had gonads. RIP man. Your memory will live forever.
<TABLE id=HB_Mail_Container height="100%" cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0 UNSELECTABLE="on"><TBODY><TR height="100%" UNSELECTABLE="on" width="100%"><TD id=HB_Focus_Element vAlign=top width="100%" background="" height=250 UNSELECTABLE="off">The Green Monster was so awesome, Art Arfons was a mechanical genious that treated us to some very extraordinary race cars. A true Icon of motor sports history. Thanks for the thrills!! R.I.P. Art!!-Sololobo </TD></TR><TR UNSELECTABLE="on" hb_tag="1"><TD style="FONT-SIZE: 1pt" height=1 UNSELECTABLE="on"> </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
Art will be layed to rest in his firesuit wrenches in hand and his copy of the J79 jet engine operating manual by his side, also included will be the jar of salt he took from bonneville on his first visit all those years ago. A gentle man and a dying breed...
<TABLE id=HB_Mail_Container height="100%" cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0 UNSELECTABLE="on"><TBODY><TR height="100%" UNSELECTABLE="on" width="100%"><TD id=HB_Focus_Element vAlign=top width="100%" background="" height=250 UNSELECTABLE="off">i love all of the arfons tractors i reley liked dragonlady because it was such a sweet looking tractor </TD></TR><TR UNSELECTABLE="on" hb_tag="1"><TD style="FONT-SIZE: 1pt" height=1 UNSELECTABLE="on"> </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
As far as Im concerned, Art was THE MAN ! He [as well as his brother, Walt] did much early drag race experimentation with various aircraft engines; Rangers, Allisons, even a three-wheeled Gyro propelled car [ that flipped end over end 13 times, leaving even Art himself with second thoughts on continuing]. I remember an article about his first jet engine [Westinghouse]. He was quoted as saying he bought it surplus, took off everything that it looked like it didn't need, chained it to some trees in his back yard, and fired it up. Blew up his shed and dried up a swamp ! He reportedly told Goodyear he needed a tire to go 600 MPH, and was told they had no way of testing a tire for that speed. Art hooked a 300# flywheel to an Allison engine, and build them [Goodyear !] what they would need for the job ! The engine went on a simple rectangular steel tube frame, with '55 Packard front end and steering [ !!! ], before receiving the outer skin [one of the few projects farmed out ]. Next stop: WLSR . Sorry for any incorrect info here, as this is from recollections some of which are nearly a half century old. Art Arfons, I salute you !
<TABLE id=HB_Mail_Container height="100%" cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%" border=0 UNSELECTABLE="on"><TBODY><TR height="100%" width="100%" UNSELECTABLE="on"><TD id=HB_Focus_Element vAlign=top width="100%" background="" height=250 UNSELECTABLE="off">he could full pull with the best of them and his fire show was cool too his son had 2 pulling funny cars </TD></TR><TR UNSELECTABLE="on" hb_tag="1"><TD style="FONT-SIZE: 1pt" height=1 UNSELECTABLE="on"> </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
arfons is my youth being a yankee as aboy i grew up with akron oh based art arfons seen tractor pulls massive fire out front jet cool.!!!! plus++++jet dragster at dragway 42 and norwalk ill see i if can any old pics talking 1977-81 see what i can do geazy hubcapz we miss josh
Art will never be forgotten. He entertained us all back in the glory days. We're losing too many of our legends too fast these days. Enjoy life....it is much too short. There's too many dreams to fulfill.....too many cars cars to build...too many more miles to dive..
Nerves of steel! They don't make 'em like Art anymore. R.I.P. Check this site... http://www.the-rocketman.com/jet_cars.html
Somewhere I have a pic of me sitting in one of the green monster jet dragsters from late 50s-early 60s at my uncles dragstrip in Erie Pennsylvania. He always put on a great show. His brother Walt crashed an Allison powered dragster pushed by a big propeller at the same dragstrip. There was a hunk of that car stuck it a tree for many years. Romeo Palamedes was also well known for great jet cars, and one Sunday the car broke something that needed welding. The closest weld shop was 2-3 miles away, and about 10 guys pushed that car right down the highway to the shop, and pushed it all the way back. He bought everybody hot dogs for their efforts. That would have been a great picture.
I still remember reading about the green monster in the little scholastic books you'd order in grade school. Definitely an early influence of mine.
How sad.... The night of the 3rd I was talking to a documentary film maker friend about him. If you can find a copy (I've been looking forever), there is a program on PBS called POV that featured Art on one of their programs years ago. It's an intimate and amazing look at his life. Some wild footage of him in his home made centrifuge he built in his back yard...nuts. Also check out the book "The Fastest Men on Earth, 100 Years of the Land Speed Record". He wrote a great foreword in it. Obit from the Times UK. Art Arfons was the junkyard genius who fought the battle for the land speed record when it was at its most intense, claiming it three times. On October 27, 1964, his Green Monster machine set a record of 434.022mph, beating by almost 2 per cent the record of the big-budget Spirit of America driven by Craig Breedlove just 12 days earlier. He lost it to Breedlove the next year, took it back five days later and lost it for the last time on November 15, 1965. The battle marked a halcyon period on the Bonneville salt flats, when the record could be contested by ordinary Americans in self-built cars. This was particularly true of Arfons who, apart from some modest funding from Firestone, had to build his own machines. Arthur Eugene Arfons was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1926. His father was a Greek immigrant and his mother half-Cherokee, and together the family ran the town's grain store. Although he and his half-brother, Walt, were both fascinated by engines, money was scarce and they had to make do with whatever they could salvage from scrap yards. At 13, he raced in Akron's All-American Soap Box Derby, and at 17 joined the US Navy, where he became a diesel mechanic. He was assigned to a landing craft during the war in the Pacific, and on the atoll-hopping battles that preceded Okinawa he honed his talent for maintaining engines. He took part in the invasion of Okinawa in March 1945 and returned to Ohio after the Japanese surrender. In 1952 he and Walt built their first proper vehicle, a three-wheeled dragster with an Oldsmobile engine, splashed with green tractor paint. The commentator at the drag strip called the creation the green monster, a name that adhered to all Art Arfons's projects thereafter, whatever their hue. The green monster proved somewhat slow at 85mph, but the brothers raised their game by switching to aircraft engines. The Green Monster 2 had a 2,000-horsepower Allison V1710 aircraft engine as used on the Lockheed P38, six wheels and a top speed of 145.16mph on the quarter mile, a drag-racing world record. It won the first drag racing World Series at Lawrenceville, Illinois, in 1953. Green Monster 6 was the first dragster to exceed 150mph; Green Monster II reached 191mph. Both hungry for glory, the Arfons split up to duel amicably with each other on the drag strip. Walt was the first to develop a jet-engined dragster, for which he was required to invent the parachute as a stopping device. Art later refined a means to fire the parachute with a shotgun mechanism, and created a Green Monster with a J97 static thrust engine from a Lockheed F104 Starfighter, bought from a scrap dealer in 1967. A request to General Electric for a repair manual resulted in a government agent turning up to confiscate the engine, telling Arfons that components for the Starfighter which had held simultaneous world records for speed, altitude, and climb rate were still top secret. He was horrified that Arfons had repaired the engine without assistance. With the businessman and engineer Tom Green and funding from Goodyear, Walt Arfons attempted to take the Fédération Internationale de l'Automobile land speed record in October 1964 on board the Goodyear-sponsored Wingfoot Express. However, the car crashed during trials, and Walt suffered a stroke as he watched his pride and joy fly down a ravine. Green had to drive the hastily repaired machine, but after two disappointing runs at Bonneville, Walt called in his half-brother, who adjusted the afterburner exhaust. On its third run, Wingfoot Express took the record at 413mph on October 5, 1964; but Art's latest Green Monster went 21mph faster only two days later. Within a week Spirit of America had smashed the record twice, taking it to 526.277mph, and on October 27 Green Monster replied with 536.710, a record that stood for more than a year before Spirit of America Sonic 1 reclaimed it. Art took the record a second time in November 1965, but lost it after eight days to Breedlove. Arfons returned to Bonneville the next year, but reached an average speed of only 554mph. On his seventh run he reached a record 610mph, but crashed before he could repeat the speed in the opposite direction. In 1971 he crashed again, driving a jet-propelled dragster at Lewisville, Texas. Three people were killed, including a television reporter who was in the cockpit with him. He built yet another Green Monster but this time his wife begged him to stop risking his life. He sold the machine without driving it, and for two decades his green monsters were a series of turbine-powered tractors that appeared in high-octane pulling competitions. Arfons once described Bonneville as like a woman you keep quarrelling with but can't stay away from, and in 1989 he was back with Green Monster 27, a two-wheeled megacycle. He was determined to beat the 1983 record set by the British Thrust2 project but, unable to defeat wind resistance, his machine flipped over at 350mph. Arfons spent a year rebuilding it with four wheels, but the finished machine was a disappointment. Reluctantly Arfons gave up on chasing the record, now attainable only to drivers with huge corporate backing and multimillion-dollar machines. The Thrust2 land speed record stood for 13 years, beaten by the ThrustSSC in September 1997, the first vehicle to break the sound barrier. Breedlove retired too, selling his latest machine to Steve Fossett, who was expected to go for the record this year. The land speed record resides, for the moment, in British hands. Arfons was buried with wrenches in his hands, accompanied by a jar of Bonneville salt and the manual, now declassified, to the General Electric J97 jet engine. He is survived by three children, and by his half-brother, Walt. Art Arfons, land speed record holder 1964 and 1965, was born on February 3, 1926. He died on December 3, 2007, aged 81
Being a crew chief on F-4D in Homestead AFB FLA from 78 - 81 and also being a Buckeye, I have very fond memories of Art coming to pull in Homestead. I know I helped????? with engine part logistics a few times with parts I could scrounge up. The MAN that invented "JUNKYARD WARS" 40 years before they hit our TV screens.
I remember something from a long time back ,It may have been in Hot rod mag, they asked Art why use the packard axel under a LSRcar ? His answer was because I had it in the back yard . rtp
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